Coupe Lunch Pub, Kadıköy – It’s A Meze Of Beers

Istanbul’s Asian side is not the place that is packed with all the major sights that first or second time visitors flock to the city to see. There are loads of places of interest, of course, in Anatolian Istanbul, but perhaps not places that top your itinerary. However, once you’ve completely fallen in love with the amazing city of Istanbul, if you’re anything like us, you’ll find yourself wandering a tad more, as well as occasionally revisiting all those major sites such as Hagia Sophia and Süleymaniye Mosque, just to remind yourself of their awe-inspiring architecture and beauty.

Coupe Lunch Pub, Kadıköy

And when you take yourself off, wandering around an area with no plans in particular, it’s great to stumble across places that you never knew were there – they’re just a part of the city; why would you know they’re there? We’ve been on the Eminönü Kadıköy ferry a few times now so that we can just wander aimlessly and, in our previous post, we took you around the fabulous Kadıköy market.

The multi-coloured bollards of Bahariye Caddesi lead you towards Coupe Lunch Pub

Well, in addition to making you very hungry and tempting you to part with your kuruş and lira, exploring markets and side streets is also thirsty work. When you’re thirsty for a cold beer, you could plant yourself in any number of bars around the pedestriansied streets of Kadıköy…but our explorations had lead us out onto the main road. We were following the Kadıköy to Moda tram line for no other reason than curiosity.

The route took us uphill along a busy shopping street, before bending to the right along the well known General Asım Gündüz Caddesi (Bahariye Caddesi). Multi-coloured bollards lead the way past all manner of little places, statues, street performers – a group of happy Turkish shoppers stopped as one point and asked us to take a photo of them…with my camera. They bid us goodbye and happily walked on their way and we’re now the owners of a photo of random Turkish youth with shopping bags. Kadıköy’s like that. It’s an easy place to be.

The happy site of Coupe Lunch Pub on the main street

And an even easier place to be when you decide you’ve walked quite enough for now and you fancy sitting down for a beer. We sat down at Coupe Lunch Pub because the key word was there – pub. We’re still on the historic tramline to Moda but Coupe Lunch Pub, Kadıköy has tables outside in the street as well as numerous seats and tables inside and, from what we could see, an upstairs mezzanine ceiling area, too.

It was only when we sat down at Coupe Lunch Pub and the menu came out that we got really interested. Not a beer menu but a beer museum. Wow! We do love us an Efes…but, you know, we live in Turkey, choices are limited on the beer front…and then all of a sudden, we’ve sailed to Kadıköy, parked our bottoms in a random bar and we’re suddenly presented with this menu with scores of beers from all over the world on it. Seriously, just when you least expect that to happen, where do you start?

A page from the Beer Museum. Kids in a toy shop…

We love to use our Turkish in Istanbul just because people there seem so willing to reply to us in Turkish. On this occasion, at Coupe Lunch Pub, one of the waiters came over to us – to speak English. He’d been doing a bit of study in England (London) and loved all the different beers he’d seen there so now he was also enjoying putting in a few hours at Coup Lunch Pub, too. The clientele was almost exclusively Turkish so he looked very happy to see two obviously foreign-looking people; especially when he realised we were English.

“Don’t look at the menu,” he said. We have some of those beers, but not all of them. And just as we were thinking it had all been too good to be true, and maybe they didn’t have lots of exciting and different beers, he continued. “Come inside and look at the fridges and the shelves because the beer changes all the time and we also have beers that are not on the menu.”

So there we were, inside Coupe Lunch Pub, Kadıköy, staring at fridges and shelves, rammed with bottles of beer from all over the world; IPAs, blonde ales, dark ales, fruity beers and some of the more familiar sights, too. It was like looking at an array of meze dishes except these were bottles and of the alcoholic variety.

Beer sampling – happy days

Our friends in England are all (proud) self-confessed beer snobs these days. They attend all manner of craft beer festivals in between drinking in various up and coming craft beer establishments. Yeah, well we’re in Turkey and for Coupe Lunch Pub in Kadıköy to present us with a different shaped glass with a matching beer from somewhere in the world, a bit cloudy – hey, we’re more than happy!

And while you’re sitting in a bar such as this, watching the people of Kadıköy go about their business and deciding what to try next whilst keeping half an eye on the strength of the beer you’re choosing…well, inevitably, nature calls. Barry went first, off up the stairs, and then reappeared a few minutes later with a big grin.

“Go upstairs. Tables and chairs, loads of empty beer bottle displays along the shelves and a row of dartboards.”

A bit more beer sampling…

Mmmm, these two pub-loving people were more than content, sitting watching the world go by from Coupe Lunch Pub knowing there was no end of choice on the beer front. It was a sunny day so the outside tables were packed – some customers were dining, others just enjoying a springtime beer. And why not? We were in Istanbul this year in both April and May/June. Both visits involved that little hop across the water and some beer sampling at Coupe Lunch Pub in Kadıköy.

There are loads of places to eat and drink in Kadıköy – some well known and some not so well known. As with all neighbourhoods in Istanbul, we’re only just dipping our toes into the world of Kadıköy. But that’s Istanbul for you…sooo much, tooo much – to see, do and experience. But should you find yourself in Kadıköy, Coupe Lunch Pub will quench your alternative-to-Efes beer thirst if you so wish. It sorted us out, anyway!

Coupe Lunch Pub, Kadıköy is on the historic tram route that runs between Kadıköy and Moda – Bahariye Caddesi.

That’s a really good news to read. Right now I’m in Ireland and, of course no trouble at all to choose anything from the beer’s shelve. When we stay in Turkey for a week or a month it’s not big deal to switch to the local Efes. But if you stay longer? If you plan to move in Turkey? That’s can be a predicament. But not any more, as I see))

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